Brisket & Limiting Beliefs

Brisket Just Like Bubbe Made It

"A young Jewish mother is preparing a brisket one Friday for Shabbat dinner Her daughter watches with interest as the mother slices off the ends of the Brisket before placing it in the roasting pan. The young girl asks her mother why she did this.

The mother pauses for a moment and then says, "You know, I'm not sure. This is the way I always saw my mother make a brisket. Let's call Grandma and ask her." So, she phones her mother and asks why they always slice the ends off the brisket before roasting.

The Grandmother thinks for a moment and then says, "You know, I'm not sure why, this is the way I always saw MY mother make a brisket." Now the two women are very curious, so they pay a visit to the great-grandmother in the nursing home. "You know when we make a brisket," they explain, "we always slice off the ends before roasting. Why is that?"

"I don't know why YOU do it," says the old woman, "but I never had a pan that was large enough!"

I love this story. It always makes me think of what other beliefs I carry blindly. In fact, Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements writes that: "as children we didn't have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet via other humans." In fact, nothing about us is our own, including our names.

So, I started to explore things I had never questioned before.

An ARTIST, me? Couldn't be. I always had a belief of what it meant to be an ARTIST. ARTIST as defined in most dictionaries is: "a person who practices one of the fine arts, esp. a painter or sculptor. " My grandfather's artwork was always displayed on the walls of our house. He was and is an ARTIST.

Now, I can't draw. I just recently started painting (and not canvases, just walls). And for a long time, I didn't even see myself as creative.

And then I saw this:And, it shifted my perception and belief about who an artist can be or what an artist can do.

Tis a beautiful thing to learn new truths about yourself.

I wonder what other self limiting beliefs I need to re-examine?